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Operation Circumspect Sentinel
Operation Circumspect Sentinel is the umbrella special access program responsible for directing clandestine Systems Alliance paramilitary activities in the Terminus Systems, comprising both intelligence-collection and direct-action special operations capabilities. Its military moniker is formally Contingency Strike Force One (CONTSTRKFORONE). Circumspect Sentinel was activated in response to persistent aggression from the Terminus Systems - ranging from kidnapping, extortion to acts of terrorism, pirate raids to full-scale colony attacks - on the neighboring Attican Traverse, which was densely populated by Alliance settlements and was a region of special Alliance interest due to the aggressive expansionist policy adopted by the Arcturus Parliament. Forbidden by the non-interference doctrine of the Citadel Council to spearhead a full-scale naval incursion into the Terminus System to eradicate the amassing paramilitaries and pirates accumulating there, the Alliance was forced to take a covert-action approach in order to forestall continuing raids into the Attican Traverse. Circumspect Sentinel acted in a preemptive-action capacity against Terminus aggressors: instead of relying on the sparse Alliance Navy patrols in the Traverse to defend against assault, it was the proverbial vanguard, advancing ahead into the Terminus Systems to neutralize or suppress emergent threats before they could more fully materialize. Circumspect Sentinel consisted of a network of covert and typically mobile Alliance assets situated in the Terminus Systems: the core component comprised undercover strike teams of the Systems Alliance Special Operations Command, special operations forces specializing in austere field operations and low-visibility operations. They were in turn complimented by undercover assets of the Alliance Navy, essentially Alliance-purchased commercial or civilian vessels crewed by undercover Naval personnel that served as discrete reconnaissance pickets and intelligence-collection vessels within the Terminus. Ground intelligence collection, as well as a variety of unconventional-warfare operations, was led by the "Ground Branch" of the Systems Alliance Intelligence Command. History Initial efforts Though preceded by several years of continual antagonism and simmering, it is generally acknowledged that by 2165 (eighteen years prior to the Battle of Eden Prime), aggressive Alliance expansionism into the distal Skyllian Verge was perceived as reckless and even provocative by colonies distributed throughout the region, most principally batarians. While this led to outbreaks of strife throughout the Verge - internecine conflicts between newly-established human settlements and preexisting alien colonies - soon this also drew the ire of the neighboring Terminus Systems. The vague web of non-governmental actors (paramilitaries, insurrectionists, pirates and criminal organizations) were probably attracted to Alliance holdings in the Verge for two reasons: perceived vulnerability of Alliance colonies there (rendering susceptible to pirate attacks, vessel hijacking and kidnappings/disappearances) and also a type of nationalistic fury from the batarians, whom viciously sought to combat Alliance expansion into what was perceived as historically batarian-controlled space. When it was clear the Citadel Council had little interest in forestalling Alliance expansion, this perceived injustice also further exacerbated unrest and even outright aggression against human colonists. Initial Alliance responses were purely reactionary. Marked incidents around 2165 included the hijacking of the MSV Cornucopia, crewed by over sixty human crewers as well as a slaver raid on the isolated human colony of Antioch, which led to abduction of seven women and the deaths of several other colonists whom resisted the attack. In response, the Systems Alliance Intelligence Command increased intelligence-collection efforts initially in the Verge itself, but later strings of incidents led to a hazy extension of these efforts into the Terminus Systems, which was typically forbidden as "off-limits" by any Council races' armed forces. Intelligence-collection efforts in the Terminus became far more serious when the MSV Set Sail for Ithaca was attacked by batarian pirates beset on wresting the ship's cargo. However, the commercial vessel was carrying a series of Alliance Navy-supplied ground-based GARDIAN defensive turrets destined for Antioch colony, intended to forestall future slaver attacks there. Though there were no Naval personnel aboard the vessel, once the pirates learned of the ship's cargo, they hauled it off and also abducted all the crewers onboard, suspecting they were Alliance military personnel, and tortured them - nothing more was heard of them. The disappearance of the Set Sail for Ithaca, and the corresponding loss of its military materiel, marked a turning point in Alliance intervention in the Verge and the adjacent Terminus Systems. Although the raid on the vessel was purely coincidental, batarian forces in the Terminus jubilantly claimed it was a directed strike on the ship to wrest control of its military weapons. Perceived as a direct attack on Alliance military assets, and further aggravated by the pirating of the vessel and all its crew, outrage in the Arcturus Parliament ordained that Alliance efforts were quietly but fiercely directed towards fully defining the scope of the anti-Alliance forces infesting the Terminus System and how to systematically retaliate. Initial efforts included inserting undercover Alliance Intelligence personnel into major known pirate- and terrorist-affiliated population centers into the Terminus, and also the deployment of undercover civilian freighters into the Terminus secretly crewed by Alliance personnel. These efforts were conducted with dubious legality, because the Arcturus Parliament and the Prime Minister of the Systems Alliance had not issued any direct legislative order (in public or in confidence) to deploy Alliance military forces into the Terminus. These precocious efforts by the Systems Alliance Intelligence Command though enthusiastic, had initially mixed results: for example, an undercover Ground Branch operative, Lieutenant Alessia Gearhart, was killed in a shootout with vorcha gang members on Omega. Though Gearhart's affiliation with the Alliance was never uncovered or even suspected, it underlined the gravity of clandestine Alliance deployments in the Terminus Systems, and a reminder that isolated Alliance personnel were highly vulnerable to even disorganized, albeit plentiful, paramilitary forces. These disorganized efforts by the Intelligence Command, initially unfruitful, instigated more serious and coherent efforts on the side of the military apparatus to organize a counterinsurgency campaign in the Terminus Systems. Solidifying counterinsurgency The Intelligence Command itself, operating under dubious legality and thus unwilling to commit its full resources, was unable to realize the full-fledged counterresponse necessary to strike back at the Terminus. It was the intervention of the Systems Alliance Special Operations Command that was the fulcrum for decisive ramp-up of Alliance efforts to think of the issue less of "intelligence gathering of suspected threats in the Terminus" to really "eliminating prospective threats in the Terminus". One of the actions that consolidated such commitment was when the salarian STG, through unrelated efforts, learned of an impending attack of a human colony in the Skyllian Verge (Tiber) by a batarian-vorcha based on a planetoid, X8015, in the Terminus Systems. Eager to avenge previous colony raids, the Arcturus Parliament made the unexpected decision to authorize a military incursion into the Terminus. The Alliance Navy dispatched a four-vessel strike force - led by the heavy cruiser SSV Constantinople, followed by frigates SSV Iwo Jima and SSV Gettysburg and finally the troopship SSV Pegasus - to launch a decisive attack on the pirate base in the Terminus before the intended raid could be executed on Tiber. The battle was surprisingly one-sided. The pirates, still assembling their forces, and with weapons and tactics that worked against defenseless colonists, not military naval flotillas, were largely decimated. Together, Constantinople, Iwo Jima and Gettysburg engaged and smothered the cobbled-together and unprepared pirate fleet, destroying one-third of their vessels and fighters before the other two-thirds hastily fled, abandoning their planetoid base. Thereafter, Pegasus deployed its contingent of a forty-man Naval Special Warfare troop aboard the planetoid: only two Alliance commandos were wounded in the close-quarters fighting while eighteen batarians and vorcha were killed and twice that number seriously wounded. The remainder of several dozen pirates attempted to retreat into a shuttle and depart the planetoid but were swiftly crushed by a flight of interceptors deployed from Constantinople. The remainder of the pirates unanimously capitulated and were taken prisoner. The almost-unilateral success of the raid on planetoid X8015 was widely publicized by the Systems Alliance as a show-of-force that Terminus aggression would be met in kind. Though the Citadel Council heavily chastised the Alliance but their reckless military attack into the Terminus, and the Prime Minister of the Alliance assured the Council that no further overt incursions would be made, the decisive victories both in naval combat and also on the planetoid's surface in the pirate base by Special Forces raiders was, to the military, a foreshadowing of how effective Alliance intervention could be in the Terminus - although in the future, almost certainly more clandestine in nature. Almost immediately, the Special Operations Command committed two full Naval Special Warfare Troops to be stationed undercover in the Terminus, to provide a rapid-strike direct action capability in the event that any other targets of opportunity arose in the Terminus. They were shortly thereafter joined by a full-sized Force Reconnaissance Company. Although these were by necessity undercover deployments, the growing number of special operations forces deployed to the Terminus encouraged a complementary increase in intelligence-collecting activities to identify targets for elimination. Thus began the solidification of an unusual alliance between the Intelligence Command and the Special Operations Command - the former would field undercover HUMINT agents, advanced signals-intercept platforms and would recruit Terminus denizens to infiltrate terrorist and pirate circles. The latter would provide undercover, albeit combat-ready "strike packages" that would be ready to assault any identified targets that emerged from these analyses. To solidify Alliance commitment to this effort, a Logistics Command (LOGCOM) detachment was deployed to reinforce the medium-sized Naval Special Warfare and Force Reconnaissance detachments forward-deployed in the Terminus. Together, the strike forces and their accompanying support group were headquartered at Firebase Hydra and were incarnated as Joint Special Operations Task Force Prophet (JTF Prophet). JTF Prophet and early efforts operator attached to JTF Prophet, operating in the Terminus Systems.]] Ironically, despite the risk and considerable commitment of "standing up" a medium-sized Special Forces contingent at Firebase Hydra, the earliest successes by JTF Prophet were executed through the intermediacy of unmanned, remote-controlled drones. Based on intelligence collected from the raid on X8015, the Intelligence Command readily identified the secondary "back up" operating site of the particular batarian-vorcha pirate group that had sought to attack Tiber. Because an overt Alliance Navy attack with manned cruisers and frigates on a second batarian-controlled asteroid was politically untenable, an undercover Alliance Intelligence-owned mercantile freighter, the MSV Pony Express, was used to carry a dozen Preying Mantis-class stealth drones to the system in question, with a joint Intelligence/Navy team of remote operators controlling the drones. The MSV Pony Express successfully reached the target system via FTL, and deployed its stealth drone squadron from the periphery of the system. Though the actual speed of the drones was quite cumbersome (due to their stealth characteristics), the attack was executed within mission parameters. Despite some technical problems of long-range remote drone control and also some miscoordination amongst the operators, trying to battle and maneuver twelve different fighters in the same airspace simultaneously, the attack was one-sided. One Preying Mantis was destroyed by enemy GARDIAN fire and a second was significantly damaged and forced to self-destruct lest it be left behind. However, all pirate vessels were mercilessly terminated and the physical pirate base on the asteroid's surface was extensively cratered with thermobaric weapons, rendering it all but uninhabitable. Pony Express collected the ten remaining stealth drones and left the system without a trace of its presence. The standard set by the attack - a decisive Alliance victory, without any remaining military footprint - became the gold standard for future JTF Prophet missions in the Terminus. Though the death of the pirates was only discovered several weeks later when other batarian ships visiting the pirate base found it massacred, Omega was abuzz with theories of what had happened, including internecine warfare between the pirates due to a leadership struggle; an attack by the mysterious "Collector" foes (a general bogeyman to which most unexplained events were ascribed to in the Terminus) or finally, a clandestine Alliance military attack. There was, however, never any public resolution about the underlying cause. Similarly discrete means underpinned most early successes. A Ground Branch paramilitary operations officer on Omega Station was able to discretely over the course of several weeks, place tracking devices on ten or so suspicious vessels that might or might not be associated with terrorist activities. Though only three of the vessels could be subsequently followed by Alliance Intelligence "shadow" ships, one of them led to a suspect turian terrorist group on the distant world of Triginta Petra, with the tagged vessel setting down on a small, distant compound in the reaches of the desert. While the compound was kept under orbital surveillance, a Force Reconnaissance platoon was dispatched via prowler from Firebase Hydra. When that hemisphere of Triginta Petra fell into solar night, the Force Recon strike team was air-assaulted onto the target compound with electronic-warfare support to jam enemy sensors and comms. In the resultant battle, seven turians were found to reside at the compound: the two sentries that were awake were killed in the shootout. The remaining five, soundly tucked into sleep-pods, were captured without incident with none of the Marines involved in the assault seriously wounded. While it turned out the importance of the "terrorists" was overestimated - they were former, disgruntled colonists of Taetrus that had purchased some illegal weapons from Omega and had issues with the colonial government but no real actionable plan to return home and wreck havoc - it was still a crisp success. The five turians, after interrogation, were transferred to the Turian Intelligence apparatus, with unexpected gratitude from turian officials, and an increasing turian appreciation for the Alliance's ability to quietly strike and nab individuals from the Terminus. Operating sites The forward headquarters of Operation Circumspect Sentinel were emplaced in Firebase Hydra, a hydroelectric plant on the moon of Avuna in the Caleston Rift, Terminus Systems.